Greetings! I'm new to this forum, but am sort of an "oldtime" Apple IIgs user having had one for about 15 years... I got it in high school and it was indeed ancient even back then. Now after all this time, I'd like to get the most out of it by getting some software I've downloaded over to it. This is turning out to be much more difficult than I'd anticipated! I've looked over many forum discussions and web articles that illustrate various methods of accomplishing this with an old Mac. Luckily I have the perfect era Mac for this--an old LCIII. Most of the software/games I'd be downloading will be in ShrinkIt, Binscii or .DSK image form. So I think the first step will be to get ShrinkIt and Binscii over to the GS, then I can unshrink DSK2FILE and ASIMOV (the software that deals with .DSK images).
Here lies the problem--I need to get a self-extracting version of at least one of these programs to the GS. I've found a supposed self-extracting .EXE for both ShrinkIt and Binscii, but when I write it to a ProDOS 3.5" disk, the file attributes get changed to $00 and I get a message something along the lines of "File type mismatch" when trying to execute it from BASIC. I've read somewhere that other people had this problem and used a Mac program called "ProTYPE" to write the files properly--I used this program to no avail; the .EXE files are still coming up as type $00.
The weird thing is that ProTYPE did seem to work for one other file I downloaded--it was a self-extracting archive of GS-ShrinkIt (GSHK.SEA). I can't remember what type it came up as, but it was something other than $00 (and as a test, I tried transferring GSHK.SEA WITHOUT using ProTYPE and sure enough it came up as $00--so obviously using ProTYPE in this case did something to the file). Unfortunately I have no idea how to execute an .SEA file on the GS--from what I've read, it seems I might need a special GUI for this (one that I cannot use anyway as I have no hard drive for the GS)--can anybody confirm this for me?
I don't know why ProTYPE would work for an .SEA file and not for the .EXEs I downloaded. I think I read somewhere that someone had a similar problem with ProTYPE and suggested an alternative program--I think it's called "ProDOSifier"...(?) I think with this program, you have to manually specifiy the type (in which case I'd need to find myself a chart of file types for .EXE, .SHK, .BSC, .DSK etc.) Has anybody here ever used ProDOSifier, or know of some other program that can aid me in my task? Any suggestions/info would be greatly appreciated!--I've wasted days trying to figure this out on my own!
Thanks for reading.
Do you *only* have a Mac LC III? This is all much easier with a PC and CiderPress (to take care of those pesky .SHK/.BSC files, and turn them into .DSK) and then something like ADTPro to ship full-disk images down to the GS as disk-at-once affairs. That's my opinion (and a biased one, at that.)
What I did back before that was to use the code in the "useful stuff" directory on what used to be the ground FTP site:
http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ground.icaen.uiowa.edu/useful.stuff/
and there's lots of helpful apps to do the micro-steps of translating from format to format, switching filetypes, and all that if you have to manage with a GS and (old) Mac. See tchange's text file for hints on how to get bootstrapped when going that route:
http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ground.icaen.uiowa.edu/useful.stuff/tchange.info.txt
Yes, I have a PC--this is what I use to download the image files as my Mac has no internet connection. I transfer the files to Mac via PC formatted 3.5" disk or a CD-R (luckily I have an external CD-ROM for the Mac). I copy the files to a temporary folder on the Mac, open them up in ProTYPE and then copy the files back to a ProDOS formatted disk (either created on the Mac or the GS; doesn't seem to make any difference).
The ADTPro route requires special cabling, doesn't it? And probably specific settings in terminal software (that's sure to throw me for a loop as I'm network-stupid)... honestly, I was hoping to avoid that route--though I'm sure it becomes a much more straight forward process once you get it working. I was hoping to just get the Mac to write a proper disk (or single file in this case) despite the extra couple steps involved. Besides the cost of the cable, I'm dealing with a bit of a time crunch here--my plan is to provide my uncle with copies of everything I make as part of a Christmas gift (he's nostalgic for these machines as he had one when it was new, and I've managed to dig up an extra IIGS in a friend's basement!). So I've got until the 24th--2 weeks essentially.
I'm not planning on copying everything under the sun or I would have picked up a cable for ADTPro by now. But I figure for Space Quest, King's Quest and a particular music application, the Mac disk method ought to be sufficient, convoluted as it may be (if I could only get it to work!)
I hadn't checked out CiderPress yet as I'm not far enough along to deal with .DSK images on the GS... If I could only get ShrinkIt so that I could in turn get DSK2FILE...
It does require a serial cable, that's true. It is its own "terminal" software, so there's nothing else to do there.
Indeed.
Follow the path in the tchange file. That is the first step. Then you can start getting the other utilities running in turn.
Thanks for those links. Actually that first link is where I originally got SHRINK.EXE (and could not get it to execute transferring it over with ProTYPE). I'll try to get TCHANGE.BIN working tonight when I get home... assuming I get that program working, what type should I change SHRINK.EXE to?
Once I get ShrinkIt working, I *should* be all set to get everything else up and running I think...
Okay, finally got it all working--thanks for the help! Took me a while to get it all figured out--there were like 3 different sets of instructions I found on the web, all with slightly different steps and utilities to use (on both the mac and IIgs end). Nothing quite worked for me until I started mixing and matching steps/utils from all the outlined methods. So for anyone interested, here is the method that worked for me:
* download SHRINK.EXE on PC (via above link)
* transfer to Mac LCIII (running OS 7.6) via PC formated 3.5" disk or CDR (copy to temporary folder on Mac)
* use ProDOSifier to set SHRINK.EXE's attributes to TXT (this is what threw me before--I was setting it to EXE, but it is a self-executing TEXT file)
* copy SHRINK.EXE to ProDOS formated 3.5" disk
* open SHRINK.EXE on IIgs (in BASIC type -SHRINK.EXE)
ShrinkIt extracts itself on the disk where SHRINK.EXE is located.
Other compression/encoding/imaging software is now easily transferrable as it can all be found in ShrinkIt (.SDK or .SHK) format. Anything that can't be found in this format (.DSK, .2MG, .NIB etc.) can be converted to .SDK with CiderPress on the PC.
* When transferring .SDK's over to the GS, use the above steps--only set the file attributes to BIN (I find this works best though supposedly ShrinkIt doesn't care what the attributes are--just make sure to set the attributes to something, otherwise the GS will see it as "unknown filetype").
Sometimes ShrinkIt does not display the .SDK files on a disk when you go to "open archive", even though it does when you "catalog" the disk. In this case just type the volume name of the disk / filename and hit return. EXAMPLE:
/VOLUME1/BSCIT.SDK (assuming the .SDK file is in the root directory)
The archive then shows up on the screen and can be extracted. I don't know what causes this--sometimes I can see all the .SDK files on a disk and sometimes none and they have to be manually typed in. But so far they've all worked perfectly using this method. Although I'll warn anyone--if you only have one 3.5" drive for the GS, no hard drive and little RAM, the constant disk swapping to extract an 800K 3.5" disk image is a pain in the ass! Extracting 140K 5 1/4" disk images is a breeze though.